A Quote by Alice McDermott
I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.
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I believe a good writer can write a good book with any sort of character, in any sort of setting, but I prefer to write about the outsider. It might just be because I've been one (or perceived myself to be one) for so much of my life. But the simple fact of being marginalized immediately brings conflict to a story before the narrative even begins, and that's gold for a writer because it means that your character already has depth before events begin to unfold.
I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.
Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.
You're trying to dramatize events to tell a story most effectively. That doesn't mean the events aren't true, it just means you're making them as dramatic as you possibly can.
Granted, I'm more interested in technology than most people, and less interested in politics than most. But I don't like to think about categories. I really see myself as a general non-fiction writer.
The future is about emotion: reactions to events are usually far more important than the events themselves.
I find the science behind major natural events almost more interesting than the way in which those same events wreak their effects on human society.
I'm like a decathlete who does all of the events he's used to, but is being forced by certain circumstances to focus on three events, and being forced to focus on events that he wasn't that interested in, and also weren't his strongest events.
Many people believe that decentralization means loss of control. That's simply not true. You can improve control if you look at control as the control of events and not people. Then, the more people you have controlling events - the more people you have that care about controlling the events, the more people you have proactively working to create favorable events - the more control you have within the organization, by definition.
And I have again observed, my dear friend, in this trifling affair, that misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence.
A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don't even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they're so mundane that we just take them for granted. But history shows that it's the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic 'newsworthy' events.
Your responses to the events of life are more important than the events themselves.
The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.
I don't think my work is so much about opening up wounds. I think it's about understanding the nature of the wound. I'm not bleeding on the canvas. I, like most people, have suffered traumatic events. The character of a person's life is determined by the way they deal with those events. I am a creative person and I deal with it creatively.
It is not the events but our viewpoint toward events that is the determining factor. We ought to be more concerned about removing wrong thoughts from the mind than removing tumors and abscesses from the body.
The odd thing about being a writer is you do tend to lose yourself in your books. Sometimes it seems like real life is flickering by and you're hardly a part of it. You remember the events in your books better than you remember the events that actually took place when you were writing them.
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